By Minerwa Tahir and Shehzad Arshad
THE ELECTIONS in Pakistan on 8 February produced a split mandate. Despite severe repression and rigging on the polling day, the candidates backed by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, forced to stand as ‘independents’, won 92 of the 266 directly elected seats. Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League—Nawaz (PML-N) despite backing by the military establishment, won only 75 seats. The Bhutto dynasty’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) came in third with 54 seats.
Besides these seats, parties will be allocated more seats from the 70 reserved for women and religious minorities. Because these seats are not available to independent candidates, Khan’s ‘independents’ have joined with the Majlis Wahdat-i-Muslimeen (MWM), a religious party of the Shia sect that won a National Assembly seat from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. PTI-backed independents have proposed a similar coalition with Jamaat-e-Islami in the provincial assembly of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa but, to date, that proposal has not been accepted.
In other provincial assemblies, the PML-N retained its majority in Punjab while the PPP kept Sindh. The PPP is also likely to form an alliance with the nationalist parties in Balochistan. In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the ‘independents’ dominated.
Meanwhile, the PML-N and PPP have formed their own alliance with four other parties, namely Muttahida Qaumi Movement—Pakistan (MQM-P), Pakistan Muslim League—Quaid (PML-Q), Istehkam Pakistan Party (IPP) and Balochistan Awami Party (BAP). This brings their tally of seats to 152 which, with the addition of reserved seats, will take them over the 169 seats necessary to form a government. Missing from this coalition is Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam—Fazl (JUI-F). He was the president of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), which was founded in 2020 as a movement against the alleged rigging of the 2018 elections that brought Imran Khan to power and was a key force behind Khan’s ousting in 2022. The other members of the PDM have joined the governing coalition. The JUI-F falls under the parliamentary umbrella of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Pakistan, which won only four National Assembly seats. The party has rejected the ‘rigged’ results.
PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari said that even though his party and the PML-N had contested the election separately, they had now come together in the ‘interests of the nation’. Nawaz Sharif’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz, is proposed for the Punjab chief minister while his brother, Shehbaz Sharif, has been chosen as the candidate for prime minister. It has been hinted that Zardari will become president.
The election results also showed a mass rejection of the religious parties. The JUI-F lost seats. The clerical fascist Tehreek Labbaik Pakistan failed to get more than 5% of the vote in any constituency. The Jamaat-e-Islami tried to cash in on the PTI’s anti-rigging campaign in cities like Karachi, but without success. Their Karachi chief did win a provincial assembly seat but relinquished it, claiming that it was actually the PTI-backed candidate who had won. In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the Islamist party had secured 3 seats, but soon after news of a provincial coalition government with the PTI surfaced, a recount resulted in the party’s candidates losing their positions to independents.
‘Stolen mandate’
The crackdown against the PTI before the polls was so severe that the PML-N was expected to make a clean sweep in the election. Khan and other key leaders were disqualified, jailed after convictions and/or barred from standing for election. Some party leaders defected. The PTI was stripped of its election symbol and its candidates had to stand as independents and were not allowed to campaign. The internet was shut down on the day of election.
Despite such widespread repression, PTI-backed candidates declared an impressive victory of 170 seats, based on results recorded at the polling stations. However, following a 12-hour media blackout, when the results were finally declared, this figure was nearly halved to 93. The PTI rejected this new figure, and are contesting in the courts after having their observers barred from key stages of the ballot counting process.
Evidence of corruption or vote contamination can also be seen by the contradictions in reporting. When unofficial results were announced, Nawaz Sharif, initially slated as the candidate for premiership, was trailing behind PTI-backed Yasmin Rashid by a margin of 13,000 votes. And yet, after 12 hours, results were announced in favour of Nawaz Sharif.
The masses have spoken
The turnout for the elections made it abundantly clear that the masses opposed the crackdown against the PTI. As much as the state wanted to use convictions, imprisonments and slander to show that the PTI era was over, the voters still made it the single largest party in terms of seats.
The turnout was an expression of anger not only against manipulation of the electoral process, but also against the rising cost of living and the unbearable misery imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The PTI is no anti-IMF party; in fact, Khan introduced the recent bailout package. As a result he lost some support but, after he fell out with the military establishment, he rejected some of the IMF’s conditions which were then implemented by the subsequent caretaker government. This allowed the PTI to appear as opposed to the IMF. The establishment’s crackdown against the PTI then reinforced its status as the main opposition.
A neoliberal regime
The PTI has mounted a legal challenge to the election results. The outcome is yet to be seen, but what is obvious is that dark times lie ahead for the Pakistani masses as they await the forthcoming government’s economic policy.
Lip service regarding creating employment opportunities and development aside, the PML-N is a party of big capital and a slave of its masters in the US, China and the Gulf states. As soon as a new government takes charge, it will need to implement the diktat of the IMF. With opposition from the PTI, it is unlikely that the next government will hold a credible amount of control over the Pakistani government. At the same time, the government will also have to enforce the economic agenda of the military establishment. Although in coalition, the PPP is sure to take advantage of the discontent that the new government will likely face before too long, which is why it has presented itself as a pro-people alternative. The PTI’s supposed opposition to the IMF’s conditions is likely to strengthen its popular support, however misguided that may be.
Meanwhile, Nawaz Sharif’s expected massive victory has not materialised. At one time, opinion polls had suggested that in Punjab, its stronghold, the PML-N still led over the PTI. So confident was he that he scheduled a victory speech just hours after polls closed. Those dreams were shattered when the results were announced. His party was barely able to secure half of the seats in Punjab and almost all the remainder were lost to PTI-backed ‘independents’. The defeat can safely be attributed to the party’s record of decades of corruption; in government, Shehbaz Sharif’s focus was on getting the charges against his brother removed while enforcing IMF policies. Massive inflation and widespread unemployment hit the party’s support base.
Today, Sharif is probably aware that, even if his party may form the government for the time being, the split mandate will always leave room for a manoeuvre against him the moment he should fall out of the military’s favour. The combination of being a key party of big capital and Khan’s narcissistic personality will mean that the PTI leadership will always be ready to betray its electoral support base whenever the opportunity arises.
In short, what is certain is that a weak and unstable government will be facing a frustrated opposition.
Working-class candidates
Most citizens voting in the election were either pro-Khan or anti-Khan. This polarisation left little room for working class representatives. Besides a candidate of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party who gained 10,000 votes in Charsadda, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, none of the other candidates from left parties and organisations were able to go much beyond the 1500 votes benchmark.
Left-leaning candidates such as Ammar Ali Jan from the Huqooq-e-Khalq Party have said that, among other factors, their defeat in the elections resulted from people voting on national issues and thus for parties with a national presence. He wrote that we have to sharpen the class struggle and bring the issues facing the masses into the national mainstream in the next five-year period.
The way forward
While Jan is right on that, we would add that this will require a two-pronged approach. One, the building of an anti-capitalist united front to fight the attacks of the IMF and its subservient government. Two, the building of a workers’ party on the basis of a revolutionary programme of action.
The first will help the Left in Pakistan to become a force to be reckoned with. None of the small, isolated groups with memberships in hundreds can mount an effective defence on their own. We need to unite for common action against the IMF. We call upon all trade unions and workers’ organisations, as well as feminist and progressive organisations, to become part of such an anti-capitalist, anti-IMF, united front of action.
The second is crucial to ensure real democracy. As the experience of this and all past social struggles has shown, the limits of bourgeois democracy become clear the moment the struggle begins to gain real momentum. We need a party of the working class that can not only fight for basic democratic and economic rights, but is also able to lead a struggle to build workers’ organisations that can ensure those rights are effectively guaranteed. This is the lesson to be drawn from the Arab revolutions or the recent uprising in Iran. Without organisations such as democratic trades unions, workers’ councils and the means to defend them, the danger of losing rights that have been won through struggle looms large. Every fight for democracy or any social struggle must be linked to the question of building organisations and structures that can take power and hold it. For that, we need a party of the working class that can lead such a revolution and form a government based on those structures to replace the existing capitalist state.
